


Audacity

by angel1876



Series: Cathartic [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, I really don't have anything to say about this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-08
Updated: 2015-12-08
Packaged: 2018-05-05 16:58:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5383265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel1876/pseuds/angel1876
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Audacity:</p><p>Boldness or daring, especially with confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought, or other restrictions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Audacity

You are three years old. You don't know what the word audacity means. You've never heard it. You have a mother and a father, and they both love you. You love them, too. They are others in your family, but you don't understand their relation to you. All you know is that you love mommy and daddy very much, and if they like these people, they must be okay.

You are five years old. Daddy fell down. He just got hurt, but he'll be fine. He broke his hip, which means he won't be able to walk for a while. He got metal in his hip now, which is scary, but he says it's okay. The doctors scare you when you visit. Doctors are big and they hold you down and make you take shots. No shots this time, you're told, but you're not sure you believe them.

Daddy's going to need some time to heal, but he'll be okay again soon. Somethings wrong, though. They keep talking about a big long word you don't know the meaning of. Muscular Dystrophy. A slow variant, which apparently is good, but also bad?

Daddy comes home with a wheelchair. Mommy has to help him around the house now. He's okay, but he'll never walk again, and you can't understand why.

You're six. You still don't know what audacity means. You don't go to school anymore. Or, well, you do. But it's different. You go talk to a teacher once a week and you do your work at home now. You don't get to see your friends anymore. It's because the teacher was mean to you, and your mother insisted you be taken out of there. But it's okay. You don't need to see your friends when you have mommy and daddy. Daddy's even teaching you now. He's the best teacher.

Mommy and daddy watch this show. It's called 'Americas most wanted' and it's about bad people who do bad things for no reason. Sometimes, you watch it with them. You don't always know what's happening, but you can understand the gist of it. It's mostly families, who decide to kill each other out of nowhere. They show reenactments. They're terrifying.

You're seven. Daddy is still the best teacher, and learning is fun, but you're having a problem with math. Sometimes, daddy gets frustrated with you when you're trying to understand how to do the problems. It's fine. Little snapping and occasional yelling are normal. You hear the word audacity sometimes. You don't know what it means, only that daddy says it when he's upset. He mostly says it to mommy, but sometimes, while teaching, he says it to you.

Daddy doesn't let his wheelchair get him down. He's in the kitchen, cooking dinner for you and mommy. You're in mommys lap, playing with her. You look over at daddy...and daddy has a knife. Of course he has a knife, he's cooking, but what if he's gonna be like those people in the show? They did things without warning. You and him fight a lot lately, and he and mommy fight a lot lately, what if he's mad and stabs you and mommy? Daddy wouldn't hurt you, right?

He wouldn't. Look. He's not anywhere near you and mommy.

So why do you _panic?_

You're crying, and screaming, and shaking, and they don't understand what's wrong. Even you don't understand what's wrong. All you know is that you're afraid of daddy stabbing you and mommy. You don't know why, it'll be years before you look back and realize it was probably the show.

It doesn't stop mommy and daddy from being upset when you finally calm down enough to explain to them what you were afraid of. It doesn't stop them from telling you that you did a  _bad_  thing and you hurt daddy's feelings and that's the worst thing you can do is hurt their feelings you bad kid you.

You are eight years old. You don't know what audicady means, and you're starting to think maybe he doesn't know what it means either. He throws it around left and right these days. I'm trying to help you with math and you have the audicady to talk to me like that. You have the audicady to yell at me, I am your father and some respect would be nice.

You're not even yelling. You don't yell. You aren't allowed to yell. They yell all the time but if you raise your voice they only yell over you and get even more upset.

You don't have any friends. You have only them. You try to keep them happy, but you're so frustrated. Ever single day, you and daddy fight over schoolwork. You just can't get the math, and all your efforts to learn lead to him getting angry.

You aren't allowed to get angry, either. If you bring up how either of their actions hurt you, you only get told not to question how they're raising you.

You tell daddy you love him. You aren't sure you're telling the truth anymore. He tells you he loves you, too. You  _know_  he's lying.

You are nine. You had the  _audicady_  to look at him wrong when you went out into the living room. You don't _respect_  him because you didn't _hear_  him when he called you so you must be ignoring him. How dare you ignore him? How dare you have the  _audicady_  to ignore him?

You are nine. You're in the kitchen, doing dishes, and you have a knife in your hand. He's asleep on his special bed that moves up and down. His stomach and back muscles don't work that well anymore, so he tends to slump over when he sleeps.

You are nine, and you are thinking about how easy it would be to take the knife in your hand and put it in his back while he's sleeping. It wouldn't be hard. He's weak and immobile and wouldn't put up a fight even though he's so much bigger than you. If he's dead he'd shut up and leave you and mommy alone. No more fighting between you and him. No more fighting between him and mommy.

While you're too young to fully grasp the consequences of such actions, you know enough that killing him as a bad thing. A bad thing that can't be undone. You only barely have the self control to stop yourself, but you do. You don't hurt him. But the point is? You could.

You could kill him and he has the  _audicady_  to talk to you the way he does. You can't voice your anger, so you use this thought to cope. A small in joke to try and pretend that it doesn't feel like he's ripping your heart out when he's upset. He can only yell at you. You could end him.

You still have no friends. No one to vent to. Can't vent to mommy, mommy would take his side. Can't yell at them, they only get even angrier. You get good at keeping your anger in. Almost too good. In later years this skill will become a kind of curse, an inability to tell someone when you have a problem with them even in a non-confrontational setting. They could be getting too close to you, make you uncomforatable, walk all over you and stress you out, and you can't bring yourself to ask them to stop. Why would they stop? They'd only get angry with you, so it's better to keep it in. Shut up and hope they'll stop on their own.

But for now, you are still nine, and while you are good at keeping your anger in, you do have a breaking point. The problem here is that yelling has all but been erased from your list of responses. Replacing it is something even worse. When you get angry enough, you cry. You cry, and each time, you get a different response. Sometimes they back off. Sometimes they get angrier, claiming that you're faking it to get out of trouble.

Sometimes...

Sometimes, they make fun of you. Crybaby. Because you can't stop.

You're so angry at them. And you hate him. You hate your father with every fiber of your nine year old being, and that's okay, because he hates you, too. He hated you first. You were so full of love for him once, you had the _audicady_  to care, and he had the _audicady_  to repay you like this.

You are ten years old...and...maybe, he actually does love you?

This comes as a shock. Sure, the two of you exchanged 'I love you's continuously but the words had long since lost their meaning. They're hollow, stagnant. Spoken out of habit and not sincerity. The realization that your father might actually care about you catches you completely off guard.

It came in the form of a lung infection. The muscles that let him breathe are weakening, which means it's harder to keep the dust out of his lungs. He gets infections a lot, and the doctors give him medicine to combat them. This medicine has a side effect of nightmares.

You were in your room. Always in your room, away from both your mother and your father, keeping to yourself because any interaction lead to a fight between you and them. You're reading Harry Potter, the fifth book, excited to see where the series goes.

You ignored him when he started crying out in his sleep. This was normal. Mommy would get it sooner or later. Maybe it's cruel, but he didn't care about you in the first place so why should you give a damn about his bad dreams?

Except, when mommy does wake him up, he's crying, sobbing, you can hear the tears in his voice even though you can't see them. He tells mommy he had a dream about you. Someone was hurting you and he couldn't get to you and he's so upset you stop reading. You stop reading and you listen to them and you start crying yourself at the revelation.

He loves you. He wouldn't be crying over you being hurt if he didn't love you. It's proof. This is proof that he loves you.

And you don't understand. You can't understand. You sob into your book and you can't understand how he can love you, be so upset at the thought of you being hurt, but also yell at you _so much._  You don't understand. You just don't understand.

The impact of this doesn't last long. It's not that you forget the proof he just showed of his love for you. It's the fact that it's hard to keep this proof in mind when you had the _audicady_  to use the wrong tone of voice when talking to him and now he's yelling at you and your mothers backing him up and you are so, so, so tired of being yelled at maybe they would be happier if you just dropped dead you know you would _you wouldn't have to deal with their shit anymore-_

You are eleven years old. Daddy is sick again. Really sick this time. You can't bring yourself to care. He's always sick, and you're just tired.

Another lung problem. He swallowed a piece of chocolate wrong. It's in his lungs, and he goes down quickly. The ambulance is called as he mumbles deliriously about rolling bodies down the street. That's unnerving. You still don't care. He's just going to go to the hospital again and then he's going to come back and nothings going to change.

He's gone for two days. A short visit for him.

The three of you have pizza for dinner. You watch the lion king one and a half. One of his favorite movies. He's making plans to do better. He's going to quit smoking, although you know he isn't, him and your mother both turned the walls of the house yellow with all their cigarettes. It's probably in part why he's so prone to lung infections. But for the moment, he's happy, and for the moment, you are content. Not happy yourself, but not angry either, and maybe that's the best you can hope for.

You go to bed.

When you wake up, mommy's upset. She's running all over the house, half panic, phone in hand to call 911. You ask what's wrong, pressing when she didn't answer.

"You're father's dead."

And then she's gone, off to deal with the problem while you stay in your room, listening to the ambulance come for the second time that week. You listen to them try to revive your father, because he was still warm, and by law they have to if he's warm.

They can't. They take him from the house, but you and your mother both know he won't be back.

In the privacy of your room, when it clicked that this was real, and that daddy wasn't coming back?

You danced around your room. You were _happy._

You are in your twenties now. You look back on that day, and you hate yourself for it. The guilt twists as you finally come to realize that he was angry all the time because he was sick, not because he hated you. You just didn't understand back then. At the same time, you can't bring yourself to fully love him again, either. It's selfish. It's selfish and heartless of you. He was dying, and you were just focusing on yourself. You still are. But try as you might, you can't forget what he did.

You understand that he wanted to be a good father. But when it comes right down to it, the thing you remember most about him is how unloved he made you feel for the first years of your life.

You know what audicady means now. You don't hate the word any less.


End file.
